The Tribune

By Felicity Darville

ARRON Pinder was 15 years old when he was first bitten by the business bug. His father went to a hotel for a business meeting and took him along. That meeting, where negotiations were held to bring a Caribbean product into The Bahamas, lit a fire inside the young man.

“I got such a high off of that meeting,” Arron recalls.

Sitting amongst those men and witnessing them handle their business led Arron to discover a passion he never felt before. And while life had its many twists and turns along the way, his fate could not be denied.

This passion for business, coupled with a deep commitment to family, led the young Arron to dream of revolutionizing his parents’ company. This would be no easy feat. The business was a household name with a decades-long track record of success. Moreover, his parents wanted him to focus on school and fulfill his original dream of being a doctor.

His father, Allan Pinder, is the former Senior Director of Forensics at the Atlantis Resort. Descended from Pinder’s Point, Grand Bahama, this successful businessman owned a popular restaurant in the 1990s in the downtown, Nassau area called The Cellar.

His mother, Lila Pinder, is a world-renowned esthetician and founder of Lila’s Skin Care. For decades, this beauty born in Trinidad has touched the faces of people from all walks of life.

Together, the Pinders nurtured the business that started right in their front room and turned it into an international institution of self confidence and natural beauty.

“It didn’t start off as a business,” Aaron told me, “It was a hobby.”

“My mother really started out just to help people. She formulated these products out of our home, because there were so many people coming to her with acne scarring and pigmentation problems. There was really nothing on the market that catered to melanated skin tones.”

“The products were working, and people were happy with their results. Others saw the results, and wanted the same thing for themselves.”

That’s how Lila’s Skin Care began. Arron and his brother Anand watched their parents nurture Lila’s gift of helping others into a business. In 1980, they officially opened their doors with a storefront in Freeport, Grand Bahama.

It was a humble beginning in a shared space with a hair salon. But Lila’s name had well preceded her. On the first day that they opened their doors, the Pinders saw over $700 in revenue. They took this as a good sign - and they were right!

By 1984, Lila’s Skin Care was in the capital, New Providence, by popular demand. They opened in the building behind Xerox on Collins Avenue and later moved into Palmdale by 1992. Lila’s Skin Care and Beauty Center offered skin care as well as hair and nail services. People from around the world like  an Arabian princess, and local celebrities, like Mrs Ann Marie Davis, wife of the Prime Minister, found their way into Lila’s chair for the best in skin care.

Arron always wanted to be involved with the family business: “I used to ask them what they needed help with. They would say, don’t worry about it, focus on becoming a doctor.”

At the time, Arron had an interest in becoming a cardio-thoracic surgeon. It called for intricacy and precision, and presented a good challenge for a brilliant mind. He graduated from St Andrew’s High School, then set out to do pre-med studies at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

Arron chose business electives while studying at Acadia. Here, his passions were fuelled and he rose to the top of his class in all of his business courses. He felt compelled to follow his passion, and he switched his major to business administration and economics, much to the dismay of his parents.

“They had an intervention with me,” he recalled, “To talk to me about how I was ruining my life and making poor choices.”

“My parents sacrificed a lot for us and I wanted to help them with the business, whether they saw it like that or not.”

Lila is Arron’s inspiration, because of her genuine love for people and undisputed talent for creating skin care formulas. Allan is his inspiration, because of his keen business acumen and indomitable spirit. Arron found his life’s work in continuing their legacy.

“My college classmates helped me to do the research and development for the business,” he said.

“We came up with a business plan, and we looked at the demographics to see what would work. We had a lot of fun and came up with jingles, names, and marketing strategies.”

He excitedly presented the results to his parents, with hopes that they could be implemented. His parents were happy for the material, but still implored their son not to focus on their business, but to return to medical studies.

“When we presented the business plan to the class, it was so good that college students wanted to buy the products, Arron said. “It was then that I knew we were making good headway.”

After studying for his Bachelor’s in Business Administration and Economics. He returned home and began working at JS Johnson Insurance Agents as a junior broker. He committed to his day job, but every night, Arron would continue to work on a business plan to present to his parents.

Arron’s parents finally agreed to allow him to work at Lila’s one day each week - that was all they could afford to pay him. He worked four days at JS Johnson, and one day each week at Lila’s.

Arron didn’t mind sweeping floors, answering the phones, and doing whatever he could do to learn about every aspect of the business. Eventually, that one day gig at Lila’s turned into a full time job. With pure commitment and dedication, Arron worked his way up from entry-level to the manager’s position at Lila’s.

It wasn’t an easy transition for Arron. He was bursting with ideas and wanted to implement changes. His parents naturally wanted to stick with things the way they were, because it worked for them. They weren’t too keen on their son’s desire to break a business they built all the way down to its foundation before rebuilding it with a new blueprint.

“My mom has been doing this for over 30 years,” he said, “This is her arena.”

“A lot of times I wanted to quit. It was rocky, but I kept going. I had to find creative ways to do marketing without much money. I chose to do $1 a day ads on Facebook, and it paid off, with more than $20 thousand in revenue in a month.”

From 2010 to 2014, Arron put his passion into action at Lila’s, and his parents began to see that the ideas he wanted to implement were really working. By 2014, Arron was given the blessing to rebrand and restructure the business, and Perfec-Tone was born.

“My passion for this business came from my mum,” he told me.

“It was more than skin deep - skin care is really about mental well-being.”

Arron wasn’t just good with numbers; he was caring, and he was simply amazed by the amount of lives that were transformed through skin care. Marriages were being saved, confidence restored, and happiness returned. Lila’s Skin Care was built on caring for others, and Arron wanted to make sure that he continued to invest into the mental well-being of each client, by committing to giving them fantastic results. He also wanted to continue on with their tradition of supporting local charities. This way, the heart of the business would never change, even when it took on a new face and trajectory.

Perfec-Tone was successfully launched, and well-received by the public. From 2015 to 2019, Arron worked tirelessly to turn Perfec-Tone into a business with global distribution.

“It’s always a struggle - being in retail and trying to go into e-commerce,” Arron said.

“God has a funny way of doing things. God dropped me into the deep end. Hurricane Dorian came, and skin was the last thing on anyone’s mind. I was praying hard around that time, I needed some guidance, figuring out how to pay the mortgage and everything else.”

“All of a sudden one day, in September, an order pinged in online. Five seconds later, another… then another… and five minutes in, we had like 20 orders.”

A Perfec-Tone customer in California raved about her clean, clear face on her YouTube channel. Her amazing results using Perfec-Tone led viewers to place their own orders for the products. At this time, the COVID-19 pandemic had struck and with more people at home, the demand for skin care products rose.

“They ordered so much that the website crashed,” Arron recalled.

“I remember I was at dinner with my wife, who was my fiancé at the time. The phone kept pinging during dinner. At one point there were 1,000 orders in a minute. I was so excited I couldn’t even eat.”

Arron had to change the business model overnight. He hired additional staff to help with production, packaging and customer support - even family members came on board. At one point, the Perfec-Tone team was fulfilling orders up to midnight.

Perfec-Tone, formulated in The Bahamas on the foundation of family values, and inner and outer beauty transformation, had reached global demand.

In September, 2023, Perec-Tone moved to its new location on Carmichael Road, just west of the Southwest Plaza. Arron has big dreams for this home-bred company. The new website, www.perfec-tone.com has been launched, showcasing a time-tested and proven line of skin care products. Perfec-Tone products are retailed in a few stores in the United States of America as well as South Africa, and these top of the line skin care products now ship to six different countries around the world.

As Arron presses on with a global company that was born in The Bahamas, he never forgets its humble beginnings; the love of people his mother instilled in her sons; the discipline and commitment impressed by his father; and the blessings of God he continues to pray for along the way.